Rate My Professor Dana Logan

Dana Logan is Assistant Professor and Program Head of Religious Studies in the Liberal and Professional Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a scholar of American religion and ritual whose research centers on the history of evangelicalism, civil society in the nineteenth-century United States, the experience of ritual in everyday life, Baptist discipline in the antebellum South, the relationship between spiritual discipline and policing in American history, and the blurred lines between governance, work, consumerism, and ritual. Logan teaches courses such as American cults, religion in America, race and religion, and the role of religion in celebrity culture.

Logan received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Indiana University Bloomington in 2015, an M.T.S. in History of Christianity from Harvard Divinity School in 2009, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Reed College in 2007. She joined the UNCG faculty as Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. Her first monograph, Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Policing the South: Baptist Church Discipline in the Antebellum South, along with articles including “Itty Baby: Shaker Kinship in the Era of Manifestations” and “It Was Never About the Snakes: Synanon, Cult, and the Devil in Religious Studies.” Logan's peer-reviewed publications include “Ritual Chores: Catharine Beecher’s Domesticity” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2021), “Shaker Dance and the Religious Production of Spectacle” in Religion Compass (2021), “Shaker Fan Fic” in American Religion (2020), “Circulating Sin: Black Sailors and Benevolence in Early Nineteenth-Century New York” in Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power (Routledge, 2018), “The Lean Closet: Asceticism in Post-Industrial Consumerism” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2017), and “Lydia Maria Child and the Urbanity of Religious Cosmopolitanism in Antebellum New York City” in the Journal of Urban History (2021). Invited publications feature “What Would a Religious History of Goop Look Like?” in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion (2018) and “Republicanism: Religious Studies and Church History meet Political History” in Church History (2015). Her scholarship illuminates the sensory and disciplinary dimensions of Protestant practices and their broader cultural implications.